Age-old history of revenge
Our troops, in response to the terrorist attack in the Bryansk region, finally delivered retaliatory strikes against the enemy's military infrastructure. This blow was unprecedented. They hit infrastructure facilities mainly with “Daggers”. Can this action be considered real retribution?
To begin with, let's try to figure out what a retaliation strike is. Elemental revenge. It has been practiced by some peoples for centuries, and military actions only spurred it on. Sicilians, Calabrians, Corsicans, Neapolitans, Basques, our Caucasians were sometimes so carried away by blood feuds that they had no time to do other things. They were literally consumed by it.
In war, the prerequisites for blood feuds, both mass and individual, grow like mushrooms after rain. Retribution strikes were used by almost all the armies of the world in all the wars waged by mankind. Examples of this are innumerable.
Usually they were practiced in response to some resonant, especially cynical action of the enemy, which, even in military conditions, violated some generally accepted norms of morality. A retaliation strike is, as a rule, not a combined arms operation, but a surgical operation. It is usually carried out by sabotage and reconnaissance groups.
And often not military, but from among the special services. So, during the Finnish campaign in 1939, the retaliation operation was carried out by the future commander of the airborne troops, Army Commander Vasily Margelov. The Finns, as they say, started first. And they ran into.
The Finnish sabotage group raided the rear military hospital of the Red Army. As a result, over forty wounded soldiers and several doctors and nurses were killed. This was a flagrant violation of the rules of warfare of the time.
Among the dead was a young nurse, the beloved of Lieutenant Margelov. Their relationship in full swing flew to the wedding. Vasily Filippovich then remembered his first love all his life until his death.
Upon learning of the death of the bride, the young lieutenant, of course, burned with a frantic thirst for revenge. The command took advantage of his emotional state and offered to lead a group of saboteurs-avengers. He readily agreed.
And two weeks later, a retaliatory raid was made on a Finnish mobile medical center. All wounded Finns and PMP guards were killed. Our saboteurs did not touch the nurses. Only one girl died from a fragment in a grenade explosion.
The saboteurs finished off all the wounded Finns with knives and point-blank shots. After that, the Finns did not make a single raid on the rear of the enemy in the entire campaign. They just didn't take the risk. The action of retaliation achieved its goal.
Answer for Zoya
During the Great Patriotic War, the action of retaliation was used by our troops not so often. This was due to the high mobility of troops - both ours and the enemy, and the rapid movement of the front line. It was far from always possible to calculate the enemy, because over six hundred German divisions fought on the Eastern Front.
The stigma of damnation and the Damocles sword of retribution, by definition, hung only over the SS divisions. There were about thirty of them. Here they were worthy of retribution by definition. By the way, there were just over half of the German divisions among the SS.
Among them were Croatian, Danish, Ukrainian, French, Albanian and even Azerbaijani units. Wanting to curry favor with the "true Aryans", the SS showed pathological cruelty towards the civilian population.
And only for this they were the addressee of the action of sacred revenge. As a rule, they were not taken prisoner. They knew this very well, calling themselves "suitors of death." Of the German infantry divisions, only one became the addressee of revenge - the 197th Infantry.
It was her soldiers who first tortured for a long time, and then publicly hanged the partisan Hero of the Soviet Union Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. And abused her already dead. The order not to take the soldiers of the division prisoner was given personally by Joseph Stalin, and the order was carried out.
But the Soviet leader did not stoop to personal revenge, unlike Adolf Hitler, to whom the thirst for revenge was by no means alien. The Fuhrer had only two widely declared personal enemies in the USSR - the announcer of the State Committee for Radio Broadcasting Yuri Levitan and the submariner Alexander Marinesko.
Levitan, with his delivered unique baritone, instilled in our fighters steel confidence in the inevitability of victory. Agree, today we really miss the new Levitan, whose every word was believed by everyone.
And Lieutenant Commander Marinesko managed to sink the German floating base "Wilhelm Gustloff", on board which were the crews of 70 submarines - about five thousand people. “I will hang Levitan first in Moscow!” Hitler said. Revenge, however, failed to either one or the other.
American Retribution
The Americans took revenge on the Japanese from the bottom of their hearts for the Japanese raid. aviation to Pearl Harbor. As a result of a massive air bombardment, the entire American fleet in the harbor was killed. This made a lasting impression on the Americans. They literally burned with a thirst for revenge.
It became clear that the opening of the Second Front (which the Anglo-Saxons had avoided for so long) was indispensable. He was open. But this was not enough for high-quality resonant revenge. In addition, from the very first days after the landing in Normandy, the situation began to develop in a dramatic manner for the Americans.
The American landing on Omaha Beach almost choked on its own blood. Later, in the battles on the mainland, the Germans put up fierce resistance to the Americans. And they almost threw them back into the waters of the Atlantic as a result of the counter-offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944.
The Japanese offenders on Okinawa fought no less stubbornly with the invaders. American soldiers there began to die literally by the thousands. Instead of sacred revenge, it turned out to be some kind of chaotic bloody mess. Something had to be done. And calm the indignant public opinion, and satisfy the thirst for revenge.
And also it was necessary to bring to his knees and force the inflexible and fanatical enemy to capitulate. And the Americans went for broke - they dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was the first and only to this day in stories mankind the use of atomic weapons against the population. The effect was amazing - the blow of retribution exceeded all expectations. Humanity shuddered. Pearl Harbor has been avenged and the vengeance of millions of Americans has been satisfied.
And in Russian
The Soviet army practiced retaliatory strikes many times in Afghanistan. In fact, not a single Mujahideen raid on one or another of our columns went unpunished. The situation was greatly simplified by the fact that in Afghanistan the spooks fought not only with our army, but also with each other.
There, everyone had an account with everyone. And informants who could tell our troops the coordinates of "those they are looking for" were always there. And during the war in the Caucasus, retaliation strikes also came regularly to the militants for their actions.
One of the main recipients of retribution, as expected, was field commander Shamil Basayev. After a raid on a school in Beslan and the death of several hundred Ossetian schoolchildren, an aerial bomb "found" Basayev's house in Vedeno.
Three of his wives and twelve children hid here. All of them were covered by a direct hit. Cruel? Yes! Fair? Of course, it is unlikely, but the great Yermolov taught to act like this, otherwise the Caucasus cannot be pacified ...
It must be admitted that during the NMD we were already waiting for retaliation strikes. We have already been given more than enough reasons for this. The sunken cruiser Moskva, the blown up Crimean bridge, the murdered Daria Dugina, the raid on the Bryansk region.
And no answer, except for the recent massive Kinzhal raid on a number of military and infrastructure facilities in Ukraine. But will this be an act of retaliation? And she should be.
Or will we wait until the strategic American bomber will no longer turn around 200 miles from St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad?
Retribution must be inevitable. And the blow must be noticeably painful. Otherwise, the enemy, drugged by his own impunity, will become insolent.